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Swedish financial technology company Klarna said on Tuesday that nearly 9 out of 10 employees in its 5,000-strong workforce now use generative artificial intelligence tools in their daily work.
Klarna, which lets people split their purchases into interest-free monthly installments, said more than 87% of its employees use generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its own in-house AI assistant.
The biggest users of generative AI at the company are those in non-technical groups, such as communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%), Klarna said.
At this rate, Klarna sees much higher adoption of generative AI within the company than in the wider corporate world.
According to a research from consulting firm Deloitte, 61% of computer workers use generative AI programs in their day-to-day work – sometimes without their line manager knowing.
Klarna has its own in-house AI assistant called Kiki.
According to the company, 85% of all its employees now use Kiki, and the chatbot now answers an average of 2,000 inquiries a day.
Key Applications of Generative AI
Klarna said a key use of generative AI – namely OpenAI’s ChatGPT – by its communications teams is in assessing whether press articles written about the company are positive or negative.
Klarna lawyers use ChatGPT Enterprise, the business version of OpenAI’s technology, to create first drafts of common contract types, reducing the hours needed to draft a contract.
“You still have to adapt it to work for your specific case, but instead of an hour you can draft a contract in ten minutes,” said Selma Bogren, senior managing legal counsel at Klarna, in a press statement.
AI as a boon to the bottom line
Klarna is touting AI as a major boon to the bottom line as the company pushes to steer its narrative away from the heady days of 2020 and 2021.
In those years, the environment for technology companies like Klarna was characterized by a huge increase in hiring costs and growth at any cost, thanks to the availability of cheap capital.
In 2022, Klarna laid off around 10% of its global workforce in an effort to cut costs and prepare its business for economic turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The company’s valuation shrank 85% to $6.7 billion in 2022 from 2021.
Klarna has announced its decision to cut jobs en masse paid off as the adoption of AI allowed the core business to become more profitable.
The firm reported its first quarterly profit in four years in the September quarter, which it attributed to a reduction in credit losses as well as investments in AI.
In February, Klarna said its AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service jobs, saving the firm $40 million in savings.
The news sent shares in French outsourcing giant Teleperformance tumbling nearly 20% as investors feared artificial intelligence would disrupt the company’s own profitable call center business in the future.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/14/klarna-says-90percent-of-its-employees-are-using-generative-ai-daily.html
